Homecoming.

As the years pass, I become more and more unsettled with the idea of flying in airplanes. I still love the excited feeling I get when I enter an airport – the knowing that there is traveling about to take place, the convenience of which is one of modern society’s most priceless contributions to the human experience. I suppose, despite my background as a relatively reasonable person, the entire concept of airplanes still seems to me like a complete miracle. The fact that these enormous chunks of steal can shoot into the air nose-up and stay there, 37,000 feet above the earth, and return to the ground without just dropping from the sky…well, it’s a miracle to me. I don’t care what the science is behind it.

And so I end up losing sleep over the idea of flying, stoking one of my greatest fears – dropping out of the sky and plummeting to a long, splattered death on the ground – and then trying to force the grotesque images out of my mind. I find that once we reach our maximum altitude, I feel a little calmer (strangely enough) and that most of my fear lies in the just-before time of taking off, when there’s still time to safely land back on the pavement. I found myself today welling up with tears upon both safe landings in Minnesota and Maryland, spouting silent prayers of thanks to whatever is up there taking care of things while we sleep. In reality, I don’t know that my pre-flight prayers for safety are doing much because there’s always the chance that people like my mother are right: when your time is up, it’s up. I also always have this hope inside that if I were to ever board a faulty plane or have a faulty captain (and therefore the aircraft would be doomed), there would be a little nugget of instinct inside that would tell me and I would have the sense to listen and not board. Despite my fears, I knew today wasn’t my day to die.

There is this certain distance from the ground – and I don’t know what the number of feet is – where everything below looks unreal. All the cars and trees and buildings and ponds, they all look like miniatures in a toy landscape. It only lasts for a split second and then we’re high enough where everything becomes real again, but for that moment I can convince myself that what I’m seeing is a farce.

Today, the first time I looked out the window as we ascended towards Baltimore, there was just continuous water. It filled me with such joy that a big smile came across my face – we were only flying over the Potomac, but there it was, the biggest missing element from where I’d been living for the last year: water. Beautiful, flowing, ongoing water. I didn’t care if it was the dirty Baltimore river, because it was a river, a huge stretching body with little metal bridges strung across the swaths of land. (I always try to pick out large landmarks and get frustrated when I can’t recognize them from the air, but I did manage to pick out the Key Bridge.) The islands were drawn into geometric shapes, some brown and some still green.

Airplane windows are like postage stamps of the state you’re currently in or over. When I first looked out, great beams of the warm orange sunset-light were spotlighting over the river and over the land. A small boat made a sweeping V shape in the water behind it, motoring past a large patch of reflected fire. It was the kind of thing you see on religious cards, the dark clouds breaking apart to shed shafts of holy light upon the land. It felt that way too. A glorious welcoming, as if to say, “Here is the land of your birth! Rejoice!” And I did.

Don’t get me wrong: Baltimore is a dirty, corrupt city. But there is something altogether magical about the state of Maryland – the Bay, its many rivers that deliver life and commerce to an ungrateful and unacknowledging people, the wooded lands and the large fields, the grass that stays green without irrigation in the summer, the small ancient mountains to the west, the long shifting beaches to the east. The busy, hurried people of the north and the slower, farming people of the south. But sometimes only returning after a great departure can remind you of that. Sometimes I think you can tell in people’s voices when they haven’t been home for a long time – there is this controlled excitement when they say, “Well, I’m here!” as if, as it is for me, there is a spinning ball of joy in their chests that only grows in the moments before your people pick you up from the port of planes.

I looked out the window again. The water was a pale gray-blue and so were the clouds so that the postage stamp was just one color with different shades, broken in half only by the irregular and darker shapes of the land in between. As we passed the river, the great artery of interstate 95 cut across the land, the cars appearing to me as red blood cells carrying the oxygen necessary for life out to the city. Very suddenly we were close to the ground, and I was crying and thanking as we bounced along the tarmac.